GREENFIELD — With $133,006 it received from the Technical Assistance for Regional Planning Agencies Program, the Franklin Regional Council of Governments (FRCOG) intends to further its hazard mitigation, local emergency response and economic development planning efforts, according to Executive Director Linda Dunlavy.
Funding from the grant program, administered by the Massachusetts Federal Funds & Infrastructure Office, was distributed to “all 13 regional planning agencies so that they could help their member municipalities,” according to Dunlavy. The Springfield-based Pioneer Valley Planning Commission also received $183,285.
The program helps these regional planning agencies to fund technical assistance related to projects that have received or are in pursuit of federal funding.
“We certainly weren’t expecting it, and at first we were like, ‘We’re not exactly sure how we’re going to spend the money,’ because the status of federal discretionary funding is so volatile right now,” Dunlavy noted. “But the fact that we can spend it on either helping towns apply for federal funds, or to promote, enhance and expand projects that are already funded with federal funds, or for projects where we’ve lost federal funding, that then makes it much easier to think about how we could spend the money.”
For FRCOG, she said, the grant money will most likely go toward hazard mitigation, local emergency response and economic development.
She explained that while all municipalities are required to have a hazard mitigation plan, many towns’ plans have expired due to a lack of funding. The grant provides “another source of funds” to enable the towns to work on their plans, she said.
“It’s our hope that we can get all of the towns with expired plans back in compliance,” Dunlavy explained.
Another plan for the grant funding is in the realm of economic development. Dunlavy explained that FRCOG is currently working on a project to help aspiring entrepreneurs that may be feeling “overwhelmed” by the process of opening a small business. The project will provide a comprehensive document that aims to “ease the process [and] make it less onerous, less burdensome and less opaque,” according to Dunlavy.
In a time when federal funding is uncertain, she said grants from sources like the Technical Assistance for Regional Planning Agencies Program are especially appreciated.
“Currently, our total organization is 50% federally funded, so the uncertainty of federal funding is concerning to us,” she said. “This funding adds some stabilization, not only to FRCOG, but also some stabilization of the services we can offer to communities.”
